Czech Republic History

Germanic tribes had been living in the Central Europe before the 3rd century AD, but in the next few centuries they gradually moved westwards, and the land began to be inhabited from the 5th century onwards by Slavs coming from the east.  The migration was precipitated by the invasion of Hun, Avars and other tribes.  Czech states emerged from the 7th century onwards in Bohemia and Moravia, merged late into a Bohemian Kingdom, which finally became part of the Holy Roman Empire. 

The 13 th century saw immigration of Germans back into Czech lands and formed colonies near the western region, the invasion in 1241 by the Mongols and the defeat of the Czechs by the Roman Empire in 1278.

Several religious wars (including the Thirty Years’ war), famines, diseases and invasions by the Ottomans and Tartars wiped out a significant portion of the population in the 15th and 17th centuries.  Meanwhile starting from 1620, the Czechs lost their sovereignty when the Habsburgs became the hereditary rulers of Bohemia and established Catholicism as the sole religion in the land.

The Hapsburgs ruled the Czechs for the next 300 years until WW I, when the Czechs and Slovaks formed the independent country of Czechoslovakia despite cultural and economic differences which were never overcome and became the cause of the split of the republic 75 years later. 

In any event, the presence of a significant German minority (about 22% of the Czech population then) who immigrated to the Bohemia and Moravia region in the 13th century became the excuse for Hitler to annex and then invade Czechoslovakia despite the Munich Pact in 1938.  After WW II, Czechoslovakia was once again dominated by a foreign power, first by a communist regime backed by the Soviet Union and in 1968 by the invasion by the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact countries to oust the reformist leader Alexander Dubcek.

Human rights and other grievances in the 1970s and 1980s gradually culminated in a social movement led by the playwright Vaclav Havel to demand reforms, with the support of millions of Czechs and Slovaks.  The events which followed included collapse of the communist regime, holding of presidential and other elections, reforms in Soviet Union which loosened control of its satellite nations, emergence of a Slovak movement for independence, and finally the separation of Czechoslovakia into two separate states in 1993.